A winter FUN DAY!

January 31, 2001|By MICHAEL JONES

Eighty-five National Honor Society student volunteers and 13 from Gaylord Community Schools alternative education programs - the PEAK and O4G - teamed up with participants to see to it everyone had a good time.

Inside, hot chocolate, popcorn, face painting, basketball and movies were available to students for a quick warm up and break before heading back outside for more snow and fun.

Organizers of the day's festivities even had a clown stationed in the hallways just to bring a smile or laugh to passersby.

Long lines of students waited their turn for popular indoor activities, like face-painting and lunch.

Winter Fun Day, organized by the Cheboygan-Otsego-Presque Isle Educational School District (COP ESD) and Kiwanis clubs from Gaylord, Indian River and Cheboygan, has been an annual Gaylord event for more than 20 years.

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Kiwanis Club volunteers served lunch and arranged for the team of horses from Cheboygan for the popular horse-drawn wagon rides.

Members of the Alpine Snowmobile Club provided snowmobile rides to enthused students, and volunteers from the Gaylord Evangelical Free Church furnished a quantity of tubes for use on a small man-made mountain of snow, perfect for tubing and sledding. The temporary mound of snow was fabricated by the City of Gaylord's Department of Public Works.

Mary Ann Sagasser, a classroom paraprofessional with the COP, was impressed with the job the city did in creating a sledding hill where none had existed before. "The city did a great job. They came in with a front end loader and scraped snow into a big pile, then came back the next day and smoothed it all out and got it looking really good."

By day's end, it wasn't hard to see everyone had had a great time, as evidenced by the healthy glow and rosy cheeks of the students as they piled into warm waiting buses to take them home.